The Argument of the Book

The six studies of Being as Communion pursue a single claim: that in identifying the divine hypostasis with the person, the Fathers made a change in ontology, so that being is constituted by communion and personhood is ontologically ultimate. This file follows the argument chapter by chapter, sets out the distinction between the “biological hypostasis” and the “ecclesial hypostasis” on which the anthropology turns, and marks throughout that these are Zizioulas’ theses and not the Church’s definitions.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Ecumenical Patriarchate)

The Question the Book Asks

Zizioulas states his purpose in the introduction: the studies are “intended to offer their contribution to a ‘neopatristic synthesis’ capable of leading the West and the East nearer to their common roots, in the context of the existential quest of modern man” (Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church, Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press; London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985, 26; quoted and discussed in Norman Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92, at 87). Three things are packed into that sentence and all three govern the book: it is Florovsky’s programme (neo-patristic synthesis); it is ecumenical in intent (West and East, common roots); and it is addressed to “the existential quest of modern man” — that is, it is offered as an answer to a modern question. His critics have fastened on the third clause (see Section 08).

The question itself is ontological. What is it to be? Zizioulas’ contention is that classical Greek philosophy could not think being except as substance — as a what underlying and preceding every who — and that this made personhood derivative, an addition to a being already constituted. Against this, he argues, the Fathers, forced by the trinitarian controversies to say how God is one and three, took two words that had meant almost opposite things, prosopon (the face, the role, the mask) and hypostasis (concrete substantial existence), and identified them. The result was that the concrete who became the bearer of being, and being became relational at its source (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 1985, ch. 1, “Personhood and Being”).

Chapter 1 — Personhood and Being

The first chapter is the most famous, most quoted and most contested stretch of Zizioulas’ writing; its Greek ancestor is the 1977 essay “From Mask to Personhood” (John Zizioulas Foundation, “Chronology,” zizioulas.org).

Its historical narrative runs: in Greek thought the prosopon is the theatrical mask, in Roman thought the persona is the juridical role — in both cases something worn over a being that is what it is regardless. The tragic sense of the mask is precisely that the person is not the being. What the Fathers did, on Zizioulas’ account, was to weld prosopon to hypostasis, so that the mask ceased to be a mask: the person is the concrete being, and there is no impersonal substance behind it.

From this he draws the thesis that gives the book its name. If God’s being is the Father’s, and the Father is a person who is what He is only in begetting the Son and breathing forth the Spirit, then communion is not something added to being but constitutive of it. “Being” and “being in relation” coincide. Zizioulas’ formulation — a formulation his critics dispute as an inference beyond the Fathers rather than a reading of them — is that the person is ontologically prior to substance, and that freedom, not necessity, stands at the origin of what is (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 1985, ch. 1; the disputed inference is examined in The Patristic Question).

Two further characteristics of the person follow. The person is ecstatic — it exists by going out of itself toward the other, so that self-transcendence belongs to it constitutively rather than accidentally; and the person is hypostatic — this going out is not a dissolution into relation but the standing forth of a unique and unrepeatable identity. Communion and otherness, in Zizioulas’ scheme, increase together; the more a person is in communion the more it is itself, and the loss of either is the loss of both. That symmetry became the subject of the sequel volume twenty-one years later (Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church, ed. Paul McPartlan, London and New York: T&T Clark/Continuum, 2006).

The Biological Hypostasis and the Ecclesial Hypostasis

The anthropological application of the first chapter is the distinction on which the whole of Zizioulas’ account of salvation turns, and it is worth stating carefully because it is frequently caricatured in both directions.

The biological hypostasis is the human person as constituted by birth. Zizioulas does not treat it as evil; he treats it as tragic, because it is constituted in a way that cannot deliver what personhood requires. It is marked by two features he calls passions. First, necessity: no one chooses to be, and the “givenness” of one’s existence means that the person is preceded by its nature. Second, individuation by separation: the body which is the means of communion is also the means of distance, so that particularity is achieved by dividing off from others. The end of this hypostasis is death, which is the collapse of the person back into the nature from which it came, and which for Zizioulas is not merely a biological event but the exposure of an ontological failure — the individual perishes because it was never grounded in anything but its own nature (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 1985, ch. 1, “From Biological to Ecclesial Existence”).

The ecclesial hypostasis is the human person as constituted by baptism — a new birth whose “parent” is not a biological cause but the personal relationship of the baptized with God the Father, in the Son, by the Spirit. Baptism, on Zizioulas’ account, “hypostasizes” the believer “according to God’s way of being” (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 1985, 19; cited in Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians,” 2006, 86). The Church is thus not primarily an institution the believer joins but a mode of existence — a tropos hyparxeos, a way of being — in which the person is constituted by relation rather than by nature (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 1985, 15; Russell, 2006, 86).

Three qualifications belong to the account and Zizioulas supplies all three.

The ecclesial hypostasis is not a flight from the body. The person constituted in baptism is realized in the eucharist, where the body is not escaped but offered, and where the relation to the other is bodily. Zizioulas is emphatic that the “new” existence is not a spiritualized one; hence his insistence that the ecclesial hypostasis is properly a eucharistic hypostasis.
The ecclesial hypostasis is eschatological, not achieved. The baptized person still dies. Zizioulas therefore speaks of a “sacramental” or eucharistic hypostasis that lives between the already and the not-yet: the true identity of the person is what he will be in the Kingdom, and it is given now only as anticipation. This is the point at which his ontology becomes explicitly an eschatological ontology — the theme he intended to develop systematically in Remembering the Future (see The Book and Its Making for the disputed publication data of that volume).
Asceticism is presupposed, not replaced. The transition from biological to ecclesial existence is not automatic and not painless; Zizioulas locates the ascetic and monastic tradition within this movement rather than outside it. Whether he gives asceticism enough weight is precisely one of the charges against him (see Person, Nature, and Grace).

Chapter 2 — Truth and Communion

The second chapter asks what truth is if being is communion. Zizioulas’ answer is that in the Johannine and patristic register truth is not a correspondence between a proposition and a state of affairs but a person: Christ is the truth (John 14:6), and therefore truth is known in communion and not in detachment.

He works this through the Greek philosophical problem of the one and the many, through the Alexandrian and Cappadocian handling of it, and above all through St. Maximus the Confessor, whose doctrine of the logoi of created things held together in the divine Logos allows created particulars to be affirmed in their particularity without dissolving into a single principle (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 1985, ch. 2; on Maximus as the decisive patristic resource for Zizioulas see Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians,” 2006, 88, and St. Maximus the Confessor). The chapter ends where the book’s ecclesiology begins: the eucharist is the place where truth is not merely stated but communed in, because there the many are one without ceasing to be many.

Chapter 3 — Christ, the Spirit and the Church

The third chapter contains the thesis with the widest ecumenical consequences. Zizioulas argues that Western theology has characteristically constituted the Church Christologically and then added the Spirit to animate what already exists; the correct order, he argues, is that Christ Himself is constituted pneumatologically. The Spirit is not a subsequent agent but is involved in the very being of Christ — in the conception, the baptism, the resurrection — and therefore in the being of the Body.

Two things follow, which he calls the two contributions of pneumatology to Christology: eschatology (the Spirit is the Spirit of the last days, so that the Church is constituted from the future, not merely inherited from the past) and communion (the Spirit makes Christ a “corporate personality,” a body of many, rather than an individual whose benefits are then distributed). This is the argument behind the well-known claim that the Church is not merely instituted by Christ but con-stituted by the Spirit — and it is the argument that made Zizioulas indispensable to Western communion ecclesiology in the 1980s and 1990s (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 1985, ch. 3; Paul McPartlan, The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993).

Chapter 4 — Eucharist and Catholicity

The fourth chapter is the mature systematic form of the 1965 dissertation’s historical work: catholicity is a qualitative predicate; the local eucharistic community under its bishop is the catholic Church, not a fragment of it; and the relation of local churches is one of identity rather than of part to whole (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 1985, ch. 4; see The Argument of the First Three Centuries and The Bishop and the Catholic Local Church).

Chapter 5 — Apostolic Continuity and Succession

The fifth chapter distinguishes two ways of conceiving apostolic continuity: a historical approach, in which the apostles are a link in a chain running forward from the past, and an eschatological approach, in which the apostles are the twelve who sit around the Lamb in the Kingdom and the Church’s continuity is her identity with that eschatological college. Zizioulas argues that both are patristic, that the East has kept the second more strongly, and that succession is properly the succession of communities and their heads rather than the transmission of an individual power down a line (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 1985, ch. 5).

The polemical target is a conception of apostolic succession as a pipeline of validity. Zizioulas’ methodological remark on why the Fathers can be appropriated in a way the apostles cannot belongs here: “We cannot reproduce Paul or Peter, who saw the Lord,” but “Ignatius can be reproduced in that he could claim no access to the Lord more than a modern bishop can” (Zizioulas, “Episkopé and Episkopos in the Early Church: A Brief Survey of the Evidence,” Faith and Order Paper 102, Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1980, 41; quoted in McPartlan, The Eucharist Makes the Church, 1993, 125, and in Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians,” 2006, 88).

Chapter 6 — Ministry and Communion

The sixth chapter draws the consequence for orders. If the person exists only in relation, then ordination confers not a possession but a relation: a place in the eucharistic assembly, constituted by and for the community, and unintelligible apart from it. Zizioulas reads the ancient canonical prohibition of “absolute” ordinations — ordination without a community to serve, forbidden at Chalcedon — as the canonical expression of exactly this ontology (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 1985, ch. 6; Council of Chalcedon, canon 6, in Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 1990; see The Holy Mysteries).

The Four Theses, Stated as His

Stripped to their bones, and stated as Zizioulas’ own theological positions rather than as the Church’s dogma:

Being is communion. To be is to be in relation; substance is not prior to person.
The person is ontologically ultimate. In God, the ground of unity is the person of the Father, not the divine essence — “the one God is not the one substance but the Father” (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 1985, 40–41; see The Monarchy of the Father).
The Church is a mode of existence. Baptism and eucharist constitute a new hypostasis, freed from the necessity and mortality of the biological one, and realized eschatologically.
Ecclesiology is trinitarian and eucharistic together. The structure of the local church around its bishop is not administrative arrangement but the image, in history, of the way God is.

None of these four is a definition of the Orthodox Church. The Church confesses the Trinity in the terms of Nicaea and Constantinople; she confesses the eucharist, the episcopate and baptism; she has not defined an ontology of personhood, has not ruled that person is prior to substance, and has not adopted the biological/ecclesial hypostasis scheme as her anthropology. Zizioulas offers all four as a reading of the Fathers, and other Orthodox theologians of standing read the same Fathers otherwise (see Section 08).

References

Zizioulas, John D. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press; London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985. (Introduction and chs. 1–6; pp. 15, 19, 26, 40–41 cited.)
Zizioulas, John D. Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church. Ed. Paul McPartlan. London and New York: T&T Clark/Continuum, 2006.
Zizioulas, John D. “Episkopé and Episkopos in the Early Church: A Brief Survey of the Evidence.” Faith and Order Paper 102. Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1980.
Zizioulas, John D. Eucharist, Bishop, Church. Trans. Elizabeth Theokritoff. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2001.
Russell, Norman. “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92. (Pp. 85–88 on Zizioulas; the page-referenced quotations from Being as Communion.)
McPartlan, Paul. The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993. (Pp. 123–211 on Zizioulas.)
Tanner, Norman P., ed. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. London: Sheed & Ward; Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990. (Chalcedon, canon 6, on absolute ordinations.)
John Zizioulas Foundation. “Chronology.” zizioulas.org (accessed 2026). (“From Mask to Personhood,” 1977.)
Scripture: John 14:6.